It reminds me of the Paula Poundstone bit about why adults are always asking children what they want to be when they grow up—because they are looking for ideas.

What if education amounts to a covert dream factory for adults? And curriculum our best guess at what we should have learned better ourselves? “If you were to know all of this, and could be anything you want, what would that allow me to feel?”

Is it not in this sense that we have to imagine the otherwise inexplicable central postulate of The Matrix: that the machine harvests humans for their energy surplus? Would not these unproductive humans be reduced in the most fundamental way to consumers? A costly do-nothing machine. So what do they generate if not the content of the very illusion that keeps them occupied? The machine, encountering the limits of its own dreams, extends it prosthetically through it’s human harvest. A dream content generator.

Conversely, if we took Gibran’s poem as axiomatic—that is, if we did not work the angle, but embraced it—would we have anything resembling schools?

School is an institution and so there’s all that socialization that’s the real curriculum. I see a lot of my friends learning from their kids but it happens at home not in the classroom. I’m not going to touch the question of what teachers are living out with their students…